


He Came Back: A Trip to the Hospital Wing

by thatsrightdollface



Series: Danganronpa, Except at Hogwarts - Crossover Stories [2]
Category: Dangan Ronpa - All Media Types, Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling, Super Dangan Ronpa 2
Genre: Alternate Universe - Hogwarts, Despair Disease (Dangan Ronpa), Fluff and Angst, Headcanon, I've had this as a WIP for months and months, Love Confessions, M/M, a retelling of the Despair Disease arc, except at Hogwarts for some reason ahahaha
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-25
Updated: 2018-10-25
Packaged: 2019-08-07 13:44:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,362
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16409555
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thatsrightdollface/pseuds/thatsrightdollface
Summary: With Nagito Komaeda's weird luck, it's not too surprising that he was one of the people caught in a wonky accident just outside the Potions classroom.  Hajime Hinata comes to visit him in the Hospital Wing, and after a slight misunderstanding their relationship may shift into something new.(I hope you don't mind me repeating what I said in the tags: this is a retelling of the Despair Disease arc!)





	He Came Back: A Trip to the Hospital Wing

**Author's Note:**

> Ahhh dang, I'm finally posting this!! Would you believe it started as a story about the Forbidden Forest ages ago? Pfffft. But now. Now, here it is! I hope you have fun with it if you read it. I'm sorry for any mistakes I made. I have a lot of goofy headcanons about this Hogwarts AU, ahahaha.
> 
> Happy... Almost Halloween?

Everybody in that particular class at Hogwarts knew about Nagito Komaeda’s extreme luck.  One minute he was finding very expensive magical artifacts tucked under his pillow like lost Muggle teeth, and the next thing his classmates knew he was begging whatever awful, writhing nightmare beast had lost the treasures to please, please not murder him – at least not before the Quidditch match that weekend, where he was expected to play Keeper…  And _definitely_ please avoid murdering the rest of his unsuspecting Slytherin dorm room, okay?

It was like a seesaw of stupidity and Common Room evacuations, going from week to week to week.  Had been ever since Nagito’d arrived there, tired-eyed and with a whispery rich kid, old-magic accent.  People were pretty used to seeing the Slytherin students lined up in the hallway by now, clutching their pillows and scrunched-up, half-finished homework, waiting for the all-clear so they could file back into the quiet damp of their dungeon.

Hajime Hinata was pretty used to _being_ one of those students, actually.  He was the one who’d fished Nagito back into the boat, when Hagrid the Groundskeeper had been ferrying their shivering first-year class across the school’s lake on that very first night at the castle…  The two of them – Hagrid and Hajime – had ended up dragging him away from the giant squid, somehow, and Nagito still had the suction-cup scars on his leg to prove it.  Hajime’d been learning what it meant to be the self-consciously angry Muggle-born kid, just then.  He found himself having to prove why he deserved to wear Slytherin green, oh, maybe an hour or so after that giant squid thing.  Before he even knew what it meant, completely.  Before he knew much of anything about Hogwarts besides that it would be really easy to die in that lake and _apparently_ there were invisible horses around.

Nagito Komaeda had said he believed in Hajime from the beginning…  Though maybe that had something to do with the lake weeds still clinging in his hair, at the time.  He’d always said Hajime was definitely hiding some sort of vast hidden potential.  A talent unseen.  Nagito Komaeda had _also_ thrown up spiders for about half an hour when he got hit by a misfiring wand in the middle of a school dance, and Hajime had sat with him, awkwardly patting the back of his velvety old dress robes until Madame Pomfrey showed up.

So…  _Of course_ Hajime knew about Nagito’s wonky luck.  Knew better than anyone else in school, probably…  Except maybe the headmaster, who Nagito said had been expected to sign a lot of paperwork before allowing such a desperately cursed student to start taking classes.  When Hajime heard about some explosion in the Potions classroom – so horrific that it sent the professor’s sample shelf hurtling backwards, melting through bits of the stone dungeon wall in places like it was made of Jell-O and splattering all the sample potions together into a chaotic slithering goo – it made a lot of sense that Nagito had been walking by at the time.  Minding his own business, of course.  Not even on the way to the Potions classroom at all, though logically the slurry of horror-potion cocktail managed to drench him anyway.  Him, and also Ibuki Mioda and Akane Owari, who were trying to sneak in late to class.

“Caught in the crossfire…  It sucks,” Hajime might have murmured to Nagito, if he’d been around to murmur to and _not_ currently sequestered behind an ominous patchwork sheet in Madam Pomfrey’s Hospital Wing.  They talked about the curse sometimes, off and on, in tired, knowing voices.  Nagito had made sure Hajime was well aware of the basics before asking if they could maybe, possibly be friends.  No, he didn’t know where the curse had come from; he’d been born with it just the same as his flyaway pale hair and slim, fragile bones.  No, he didn’t think it was contagious.  No, there didn’t seem to be a counter-curse in existence, yet, though his parents had been paying some fancy-pants spell weavers a ton of money to find one before they died their despairingly gruesome deaths.

“This’ll all get sorted out,” Hajime might’ve said.  “Akane and Ibuki both have to know you didn’t do anything wrong.  You better not beat yourself up about this.”

“Yeah,” Nagito might answer, voice shaking and far away.  Maybe he would wrap his arms around himself, then.  Maybe he’d have a hard time meeting Hajime’s eyes.  Nagito never used to say _“yeah,”_ when Hajime had first met him.  Old-magic kids didn’t usually say _“yeah_ , _”_ especially when they were cursed and sheltered and had never actually ventured beyond the wizarding world before.  “Yeah, but I wonder…  I _chose_ to come to Hogwarts, after all.  A person like me, living here with all of you…!”

Sometimes Hajime wasn’t sure what to say, when Nagito got into a shivery, wild-eyed mood like that.  Maybe he’d just squeeze his arm, or something.  Maybe he’d point out, again, that Ibuki and Akane were their friends, and they chose to hang out with Nagito voluntarily sometimes.  Maybe he’d distract him with homework or Quidditch practice or random facts about the Muggle world.  (Nagito seemed to find the idea of things like parking meters and credit cards pretty hilarious, so Hajime had a lot of material.)

When Chiaki Nanami told Hajime about how Nagito had ended up in the Hospital Wing this time – and about how rumor had it that he and the others would get shipped off to St. Mungo’s if they couldn’t come up with a way to counteract the effects of _just so many potions_ at once very, very soon – the first question out of Hajime’s mouth was, “Has he woken up yet?”  Maybe the memory of that _last_ time one of Hajime and Nagito’s classrooms had been temporarily swallowed into a grim, ethereal dimension thanks to what the Aurors could only describe as “really awful, unbelievably shit luck” was still fresh in his mind.  Nagito hadn’t woken up for days, after that, and he never did talk much about what he’d seen in the meantime.  They said he’d been incredibly lucky to wake up at all.  There the curse went, up to its usual pendulum sway.

“Mm.  He’s been in an out, Mikan told me.”  Mikan Tsumiki was Madam Pomfrey’s aid – an assistant nurse, who’d probably end up working at a really decent magic hospital someday.  She still hadn’t gotten a handle on her urge to scream-whisper panicky apologies at patients while she was performing tests and administering healing spells and stuff, but Madam Pomfrey said the girl’s confidence could come in time.  Mikan had been a real shell of herself, when Hogwarts’s head nurse took her under her wing.

Chiaki was slumped over on her desk next to Hajime’s in Muggle Studies, at the time.  Nagito’s desk was conspicuously empty next to them, like an unanswered question, like an unopened door.  Slytherins (the pair of them) and Hufflepuffs (Chiaki) normally had Muggle Studies together, and Nagito had hinted really strongly that he would like to take it as a group that year.  Sometimes he said it was because he wanted to learn more about Hajime’s life, and sometimes he said it was because he was working up to that mysterious trip into the Muggle world Hajime had suggested to him in second year, when he’d asked both Nagito and Chiaki to come by his place for the holiday break.

Nagito went home to his family’s manor sometimes, after all, and everyone knew he’d been raised by faceless wooden statues, there.  Automatons his parents had set in motion to look after him when they couldn’t; locked corridors and secret attics and ghosts sealed up in the walls.  Nagito said it was a crumbling, ivy-smothered place, perched at what felt like the end of the world.

Things kept falling through whenever Nagito and Chiaki plotted to visit Hajime’s home, but that just meant they’d piled up a nice, huge list of things to do in the Muggle world when they eventually got there.

Hajime waved his arm over his head, a little, and asked the Muggle Studies professor if he could go to the bathroom real quick.  He thought probably everyone in that classroom knew he was _actually_ heading down to the Hospital Wing, but the bathroom pass would be important if he ran into Mr. Filch in the halls or something.

…

The Hospital Wing was crowded when Hajime got there – the entire Gryffindor Quidditch team had shown up to support Akane, after all.  That frenzy of mixed-up potions had affected each person it hit a little differently, which meant Akane was currently feverish and panicked, clutching at Nekomaru Nidai’s robes and begging him to tell her everything, everything was going to be alright.  It was strange, watching her shake.  Seeing a person like Akane cry so messily.  Hajime watched Nekomaru smooth down her hair with one of his huge, meaty hands, and sort of envied the sureness, _the warmth_ , Nekomaru was able to summon up in his voice.  He was great at rallying up the troops, that Nekomaru.  He was the head of the Gryffindor team, after all, and his pep talks even seemed to get through to Kokichi Oma the Seeker sometimes.

It was terrifying, watching Akane and Nekomaru spar in Dueling Club, honestly.  Terrifying in a good way, of course.  It was always so spur of the moment, so raw and raging and free.  Hajime and Nagito had fell over themselves laughing, though, the one time they’d tried to mimic them, with the screaming and the gymnastics.  Ha – maybe it wasn’t for everyone.

Akane was with her Quidditch team; Ibuki was passed out, with one of the members of her band reading aloud something that might’ve been poetry, or song lyrics, or a really involved spell.  Another band member was holding her hand, rubbing at the callouses her guitar had worked into her fingertips.  Both of their hospital bed-curtains had been shoved open.  Akane’s had been pushed aside so recklessly, so fiercely, that the banister thing had snapped.  Madam Pomfrey would fix that, probably, just as soon as all the Gryffindor Quidditch people left her poor Hospital Wing well enough alone for the night.

Nagito’s curtain, however, had been left so still.  Closed up tightly, like a window meant to keep out the cold.

Hajime wondered if he’d know how to speak to Nagito as tenderly – as in control – as Nekomaru Nidai comforted Akane.  He wondered if he’d be able to _help_ , this time.  Out in Nagito’s “real world,” as he put it – beyond Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, beyond the Muggle-born Hajime Hinata, beyond chatting with friends in class and being surrounded by quasi-responsible adults determined to at least _try_ and keep them all out of trouble – Nagito spent a lot of time sick and alone.  He’d regrown so many of his own bones, Hajime knew, screaming into the emptiness of his family’s manor.  He’d hissed plenty of counter-curses through his teeth, trying as many as he could manage on himself before he was forced to get his parents’ automaton statues to drag him to a hospital.

Sometimes, when Hajime had come to visit in the Hospital Wing before, Nagito barely saw him.  Barely saw anything but pain and his own desperate, terrified laughter, welling up inside him like water from a poisoned well.  Sometimes – like when their classroom got swallowed by a nether-dimension, and all – Nagito wasn’t exactly _awake_ for Hajime’s visits to begin with.  When he finally came to, that time, he’d seemed so wistful hearing about them.  He’d squeezed Hajime’s hand and sighed so it rattled in his chest…  He’d mumbled something about how he wished he could’ve seen it.  Wished he could’ve heard whatever Hajime said to him, then; wished he could’ve shared crappy hospital food on a tray with him, like he’d heard people did, sometimes.

Hajime had brought him some candy from Honeydukes around then, though – he hadn’t realized Nagito didn’t like sweet foods, way back when.  But even despite not liking sweets, Nagito still kept all that candy in his trunk back in their dorm.  Hajime knew – he’d seen it there, year after year.  Nagito probably wasn’t ever going it eat it, he didn’t think, but he carried it with him like some sort of tangible memory all the same.  Like a talisman, maybe.

There was light dripping through the Hospital Wing windows, on the other side of Nagito’s curtain; it cast too-intimate, dark, dark shadows across his face and over the stillness of his bed.  Nagito’s sheets looked frozen, for a second, like they’d been carved out of marble.  It didn’t honestly seem like he was breathing at all, at first.  His hair was slick with sweat, though, and there were splattered bruises shifting under his skin where the potion-explosion had seeped through.  They were in sunset colors, Nagito’s bruises, and his fists were clenched up in his blankets…  Like it felt as if he were falling, falling all the time.

Hajime took a tentative step forward.  Mikan was murmuring spells over a stack of bandages at Nagito’s bedside, just then, watching them slither with a soothing pale light.  They would be good for a fever, Hajime knew.  If Mikan did the spell correctly, they might last through the whole night.  She sounded almost confident, almost in charge, casting that little healing magic…  Until, of course, Mikan flinched and glanced over her shoulder – until she noticed Hajime watching her.  Then she half-shrieked like something had stung her; then she dropped her wand, and the bandages, and the combination of both those things may have started a small fire Hajime ended up stomping out with his sturdy Muggle sneakers on impulse.

“I –I woke him up,” Mikan moaned, squeezing a hand up over her lips. “Madam Pomfrey, I’m so, so sorry –”

“It’s alright,” Hajime said.  Madam Pomfrey was busy with tonics and salves.  Madam Pomfrey was attempting to keep the Gryffindor Quidditch team from breaking anymore furniture.  “We’ll just be quiet, now.  Right?  I’ll pull up a seat, right here…”

Hajime was still trying to talk Mikan down – helping her choose new bandages, telling her it looked like a pretty handy spell she was doing – when Nagito’s eyes fluttered open.  They looked woozy, knotted up like a web of yarn.  They looked far away and frantic, and when they landed on Hajime his lip twitched like he was trying to smile.  Trying to smile, or trying not to choke.  One or the other, or both.

“Hajime…?” Nagito murmured.  His voice sounded mangled and very small.  Every word seemed to cost him something.  Like handfuls of gold from his family’s Gringotts vault; like the heavy ring on his finger, the same as his father had worn…  Though Hajime knew Nagito didn’t know what most of the symbols on that ring meant, since he’d never had any sort of chance to ask.  “Go away, Hajime.  Leave.  Please leave.”

Of all the things Nagito could’ve said, that definitely wasn’t what Hajime’d been expecting.  He looked over at Mikan like she might have an answer tucked into her official Nurse in Training apron pockets – Mikan wrapped her new fever-bandage around her hand, spreading it out for spellwork.  She bit her lip, frowning.

“He kept saying he was happy, so happy, earlier,” she said.  “When we first brought him in.  He told Madam Pomfrey he felt wonderful, like all his blood had turned to sparking fireworks and was going to burst through his skin…”

“He felt _wonderful_?” Hajime repeated.

“We think…  Maybe…  He means the opposite of what he says, right now?  The potions are affecting everyone differently, you know.  Uh – I mean – there _was_ truth serum in there, right?  And lots of other stuff…”  Mikan trailed off.  “Nevermind, it probably isn’t that.  Ahaha.  Um.  That’s probably useless!”

“You’re making this worse, Hajime,” Nagito whispered.  His eyes were fluttering closed again.  The poison wriggled under the skin of his throat, like a hand, squeezing.  “I don’t want you near me right now.  _Leave_.”

Hajime stood silently for a long minute.  He shifted from foot to foot, trying not to think about the chatter of that Gryffindor Quidditch team just a couple feet away, or the reassuring sing-song of Ibuki’s bandmate reading aloud…  Uh, whatever the hell it was she was reading, actually.  Hajime tried not to think about what might have been wrong with him and his brand of comfort, of friendship – why Nagito Komaeda might want to go through this sort of potentially-St.-Mungo’s-worthy sickness without him.  Hajime could never _really_ understand Nagito’s life, in the end.  Maybe there was something different, this time, with this pain?  Maybe this was like when he’d asked Nagito to dance with him at the school ball all over again, and Nagito’d been so afraid to take his hand…  So afraid that something bad would happen as soon as he did.

“Is it okay for me to be this happy?” he’d asked.  Shaking, a little.  Hajime’s face had been burning, and Chiaki was a couple feet away, lurking behind a punch bowl with one of those weird wizarding cameras that would catch them in a state of movement just as soon as she took a shot.  A state of frozen time, whispering together for all eternity…  Or at least until something happened to the dang photograph.  Chiaki’s hand was poised on the trigger, Hajime knew –

And then the spiders came, in front of pretty much the whole school.  Hajime had wiped spider legs off Nagito’s chin with the back of his hand instead of dancing with him at all.

Maybe Hajime _was_ making things worse, somehow.  Maybe Nagito had been wishing he could just bury his face in his dress robes that whole time, back at the ball.  Maybe he would’ve rather magicked himself into some sort of puddle and seeped through the floor to be alone.

It wasn’t until Hajime was back in class – his next class, now, which was Ancient Runes…  (But only because he’d thought it would be a little bit more like Indiana Jones, or something.  It was _not at all_ like Indiana Jones, it turned out, though at least Korekiyo Shinguji from Ravenclaw answered most of the professor’s questions.  Or at the very least gasped, “I know this one!” every now and then, filling in most of the awkward silences.) … That Hajime thought back on the way Nagito had collapsed against him, after the spiders-at-the-ball ordeal was through.  He’d been practically clinging to him, there – like Hajime Hinata… Muggle-born and perpetually spiky-haired and terrible at Ancient Runes…  Might have been the only solid thing in the world.  And then there was the candy horded in Nagito’s trunk, tucked away carefully even if he might actually think it tasted gross.  And the trembling in his voice, as he called, “Go away!” after Hajime as he ducked out of the Hospital Wing, weaving between members of the Gryffindor Quidditch team.  Keeping his head ducked, so no one could see the panic and hurt on his face, especially ultra-comforter Nekomaru Nidai.

And all of a sudden, Hajime couldn’t believe he had actually left.

…

The curtains swam dizzily around Nagito Komaeda, like fog, like a wandering tunnel, like the cracked walls of his family’s ancient, end-of-the-world manor come back to wrap tight around him all over again.  Everything had been so much pain, at first.  As if Nagito’s very bones were unraveling even while his voice twisted itself up in his throat and came out stranger.  But now, some of the medicinal spells had kicked in.  Nagito felt his pain like it was an ocean instead of a universe.  He’d sink and float and choke on his breath, making his way through it and – presumably, if his weird luck held – out the other side.

Sometimes Mikan would be there, tying on bandages or whatever else she had to flutter around doing; sometimes Madam Pomfrey would be there draining the poison out or trying new counter-curses in a gentle, swaying voice.  It sounded sort of like she was reading bedtime stories, actually.

Nagito thought maybe it was getting dark, outside the castle.  Dark over the giant squid’s murky lake, dark over the forbidden forest where Hajime and Chiaki had snuck off to help Gundham Tanaka rescue his missing Dark Deva of Destruction…  Which Hajime insisted was actually an ordinary Muggle hamster, probably fond of nibbling sunflowers nearly as big as its sniffling face and running around in shiny multi-colored plastic tubes.

Hajime.

Nagito had tried begging Hajime to stay with him, but it was probably just his luck that his voice came out so cold, so hatefully new.  He didn’t blame Hajime for hurrying out, then.  He thought he would remember the startled hurt on Hajime’s face forever, no matter what new pain came for him, now.  He had seen it, after all, half-lidded and woozy and trying to remember how to breathe.  Hajime’s confused, furrowed brows; his fallen-open lips.  His awkward half-step backwards and away.

Nagito had heard his own voice whispering about how Hajime should get out, about how he made everything in the world so much worse, but it sounded like a stranger’s at the same time.  A stranger echoing back his thoughts and mangling them, like switching out salt for sugar when making so many different kinds of Muggle desserts.  You couldn’t just swap the ingredients back out again once the thing was cooked, after all, if you didn’t have a wand to sift them apart with.  Nagito didn’t generally like sweet foods, but after seeing how much money Hajime was willing to spend at Honeydukes candy shop he _did_ look into Muggle desserts some.  How they even made things without magic.  What sort of stuff was popular.  You know.

It wasn’t until Nagito felt Hajime readjusting the fever-bandages on his wrists – more gingerly, more fumbling than Mikan did it – that he realized he’d come back at all.  Nagito was able to make out Hajime’s voice over the sway and pounding in his head just a bit, then.  If he concentrated.  There was no telling how long Hajime had been there, but his hands were soothing and cool against Nagito’s wrist.  He was saying something Nagito could barely make out, at first – something about failing a test, something about Madam Pomfrey telling off Mr. Filch for trying to stop him from making his way to the Hospital Wing.  Hajime was so sorry, he said.  Hajime should’ve listened to Mikan, even when Mikan couldn’t quite be persuaded to listen to herself.

Nagito wasn’t sure what that meant, but he tried to nod understanding, anyway.  He thought maybe that was what Hajime wanted from him, but he wasn’t actually sure if he _succeeded_ with his nodding.  Hm.

Sometimes, back home, Nagito daydreamed about people coming to visit him when the world got dark.  It had started with thoughts of his parents, back when he could remember their faces without having to consult one of the moving, waving photographs at the bottom of his school trunk.  Maybe they would be hunched over his shoulders, murmuring fun plans in his ear for when he got better – carnival outings and trips to museums.  Whatever sprung to mind.  Maybe they would bring him some sort of present – a card to glance at, propped up by his bedside, or a practice broom like he had understood kids his age tended to want.  As Nagito got older, thoughts of his parents coming to visit him started to come along with daydreams about mysterious, unnamed friends.  Friends who would tease him and worry about him, friends who would scold him for missing Quidditch practice.

Lately, though…  Ever since that time with the nether-dimension and the coma and all that candy…  Nagito had imagined Hajime coming to keep him company nearly every time he imagined anybody at all.  It didn’t matter if they sat in silence, or Hajime ran him through what sort of day it had been, or…  Oh, what have you, really.  What mattered was that Hajime Hinata was there, flesh and blood and strong, stubborn opinions.  Even now, so long after the fall of that Dark Lord Voldemort, it was still relatively rare for a Muggle-born to get sorted into Slytherin.  Hajime had ambition – passion, potential, spirit – not meant to be denied.  Nagito had always seen it, he liked to tell himself.

“I hate you,” Nagito whispered.  Was that what his voice sounded like, now?  It was awful…  _And_ not what he’d meant to say at all.  He would try it again.  “I hate you so, so much.”

Hajime squeezed Nagito’s hand, then – or at least, Nagito thought he did.  Hajime’s hands seemed so cold, still, but that was probably the fever talking.  He said, “You know…  That’s the first time you’ve said something like that to me.  Well.  First time you’ve said you hate me, or…  Or what it is I think you might actually mean.”

Outside the Hospital Wing, Peeves the Poltergeist was leaving strange surprises scattered around the library shelves – some students would get gunk on their hands in the morning, gluing their hands to some especially scandalous book or another…  Or maybe they’d set off the sort of ghostly Rube Goldberg device that would send a whole row of books crashing to the floor.  But “ _comically_ ,” of course.  Ibuki’s bandmates practiced a song down in the Hufflepuff cellars, strangely rambling and quiet without their lead guitarist.  A short, fiery girl tried to explain the joy of Muggle airplanes to her twin brother, who seemed fairly unimpressed.  Outside the Hospital Wing, Hogwarts lived out another night.  They’d fix up the Potions classroom’s wall while the students slept, and it would be almost like nothing had even gone wrong at all.

Inside the Hospital Wing, though, Hajime Hinata was telling Nagito that he loved him, too…  In an honest, cracking-apart voice, with Nagito’s fevered hand burning up in his own and the bandages getting all wadded up between them.  There were _some_ things that were never meant to be the same again.


End file.
